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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

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martin_a

Speak/Write English on here please, so anybody can understand you. Thanks.

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As a Spanish speaker, I can tell you it was a troll comment not worth translating.

As a user of Google Translate I can tell you that the resulting text is somewhat hilarious.

In the sky the stars, in the field the plows and in the middle of your ass my sausage Colorado.

Brilliant.

That was not hilarious at all. It's downright abusive :(

Humor is such a fickle thing.

Is that actually a rule on here?

Es ist einfach eine Frage der Höflichkeit, dass wir in der "Quasi-Weltsprache" Englisch kommunizieren. Ich denke das trägt im Internet allgemein zum Verständnis bei und sollte dementsprechend auch hier zum guten Ton gehören. Ob man es in irgendwelche Regeln schreiben muss weiß ich nicht, ich dachte ich kann ja trotzdem mal danach fragen.

Better this way?

For me yes, I wouldn't want it all the time, but after so many years in Germany, feels natural, given that I understand it as good as I do English. I wouldn't say the same if you had written in Kaixana or any other language I neither speak nor can use an online translator with. I however don't think that there should be written rules, unless this becomes a problem.

google translates: It is simply a matter of courtesy that we communicate English in the "quasi-world language". I think that contributes to the Internet in general for understanding and should therefore also here to good sound. Whether you have to write it in any rules I do not know, I thought I can still ask anyway.

Im letzten deutschen Satz fehlt ein Komma.

Oh come on. :-D

Why not? Spanish and German are widely spoken; if people want to use them to communicate, then let the market decide by virtue of the number of upvotes and responses they get.

If you see my comment below in pig Latin clearly the downvotes indicate people do not like it. Despite pig Latin to English translators existing and really there is no difference then any other language I was down voted. As far as I was aware HN is an English site and we should all try and communicate in that language when possible. Websites don’t automatically translate and don’t always do a perfect job of doing it so if we came to HN and had to try decipher all the posts it would quickly become tedious.

according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... , German does not even make the top 10 ...is 12 just after "Urdu". I would not call German a "widely spoken" language.

I-yay eally-ray ink-thay e-way ould-shay all-yay eak-spay and-yay ite-wray in-yay ig-pay Atin-lay ere-hay on-yay Ackernews-hay.

Not really, but it's going to be hard maintaining a community if people can't understand each-other. Maybe in the not-so far future automatic translation will become good enough that people will just comment in their mother tongue and everything will be automatically translated. Unfortunately we're not quite there yet.

That being said HN comments tend to have a more formal tone than many other online forums, so maybe it could be somewhat viable. On the other hand we do use a lot of jargon that might confuse translation algorithms.

Nothing about English here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Or were you referring to the Internet as a whole?

Or perhaps the United States?

Or the planet?

'here' is a bit ambiguous...

Nothing about language is indicated in the guidelines or the FAQ.

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